RCom launches 3G, Aircel to invest $500 Million for their 3G services
3G in India is slowly rolling out and there seems to be quite a bit of excitement around it despite the time it took us to get here. Reliance Communication part of the Anil Ambani Dhirubhai Group on the 29th of September launched their 3G services at the company’s annual general meeting with a private news channel being streamed live on the mobile phone connected to a bigger screen.
Reliance Communications has won licenses to provide 3G services in key cities like Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Multimedia consumption on mobile devices is expected to go up due to 3G and Reliance Communications made a preemptive move of partnering with Universal Music to gain access to their wide catalogue. Reliance is offering a service called Simply Music that allows streaming of music across their GSM and CDMA networks.
There are two Simply Music subscriptions types:
- Gold: 3 songs, 3 ringtones, 4 caller tune, 30 minutes of mobile radio streaming at Rs. 25/- a month
- Platinum: 10 songs, ringtones, caller tunes and 100 minutes of mobile radio streaming at Rs. 99/- a month
Aircel, with 3G licenses in the South, North and East of India is planning on investing uptvo $500 Million on their 3G infrastructure. Aircel is expected to launch their services in the first quarter of 2011. According to some numbers Aircel has around 45 million subscribers and with 3G services, the company expects to get another 30 million users. According to Aircel CEO Gurdeep Singh, 3G will not come cheap and there will be some sort of consolidation in the market.